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      Kate Soper Returns to Opera With a Story Medieval and Modern

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      On a recent summer morning in New York, three sopranos, a director and a small crew gathered for a rehearsal of “The Hunt,” a new opera by Kate Soper.One soprano had a ukulele stored offstage. Another had a violin close at hand. And a third, placed center stage at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, mimed speaking into a smartphone as the day’s blocking work began.While that character, Fleur, primped and preened for an imagined camera as if on a livestream, she bragged about her “social media fluency” on an address to a “royal hiring academy.” All three sopranos were creating separate, self-taped auditions, for a show within the show.And yet: They were clearly doing so in some bygone era.“The King seeks spotless maidens for the hunt of the unicorn,” the sopranos recited in unison, “whose conquest will bring riches to our kingdom, expansion of our realm and everlasting power over all our enemies.”So far, so anachronistic. All of this, though, was precisely on brand for Soper, the composer and librettist of “The Hunt,” who was also in the auditorium day, keeping a close eye on the early rehearsal for the opera, which premieres at the Miller on Oct. 12.Ever since her witty and sophisticated chamber opera “Here Be Sirens,” from 2014, Soper has been plying fields similar to the one she has cultivated in “The Hunt.” She consistently borrows ancient literary texts and tropes — freely quoting from and playing with, say, Aristotle or Christine de Pizan — in dramatic works that have contemporary urgency and comic thrust.Soper has been known for witty, idiosyncratic stage works since the creation of “Here Be Sirens” in 2014.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“The Hunt” revives texts from Hildegard von Bingen and Thibaut de Champagne, among others. (On some occasions, Soper also writes her own translations.) And, as in “Sirens,” the instrumentation is limited to what the soprano performers can play onstage while also singing her complex music.Because of pandemic delays, this new opera is Soper’s second major stage premiere of 2023: In February, her grandest dramatic creation to date, “The Romance of the Rose,” made its belated debut at Long Beach Opera in California.“Probably this is the only year of my life in which I’ll have two opera premieres,” Soper said, self-deprecatingly, with a laugh during a telephone interview. Still, there’s nothing that suggests she won’t remain in demand — in New York, on the West Coast or even elsewhere.After all, her work is readily available to curious listeners. An archival video of Morningside Opera’s scrappy, celebrated production of “Sirens” — which includes Soper in its cast — can be streamed for free on Vimeo. And on YouTube, Long Beach Opera’s more recent highlight reel from “Rose” shows Soper expanding her compositional palette.In “Rose” there is the kind of experimentalism that Soper has regularly engaged in as co-director of the cutting-edge Wet Ink Ensemble. But there are also numbers that approach the hummable quality of show tunes.“This is not the kind of opera I thought I would write when I was in grad school,” Soper said. “That’s part of what ‘Sirens’ is about, feeling just sort of disgruntled and ashamed of some of my musical impulses: ‘No one’s going to take me seriously if I write this stupid show-tunes stuff.’”She added that the character she sang in “Sirens” was “struggling with this idea that you can’t have pleasure and intellect at the same time, or something. Like most people, I just sort of have gotten over my completely pointless hangups I had in my 20s or early 30s.”Ashley Tata, center, is directing “The Hunt” at the Miller Theater at Columbia University.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe soprano Christiana Cole, who plays Briar in “The Hunt,” said that Soper’s writing is some of the richest that they have sung, in a career that has encompassed both contemporary classical music and Elton John’s stage adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada.”“I have done so many new pieces in my career,” Cole said. “Sometimes there are big hits and sometimes there are big misses.” But in Soper’s music, they added, avant-garde density merges with tunefulness in rare fashion.“It’s as though Kate has a microscope, and she uses it on every measure,” Cole said. “The level of detail is not just incredible because it’s maximalist and baroque at the same time — but it’s amazing because it sounds good.”In “The Hunt,” Cole also plays the principal ukulele part, in songs that, they said, are not easily scanned for patterns.“The way the words sit on this very Minimalist, repetitive, beautiful ukulele part that I’m playing — the text sits differently every time,” Cole said. “For the audience, the feeling is that you are both listening to something that is ancient, that has been around forever, and that also does something different to your body than any music you’ve ever heard.”There is asymmetry, too, in Soper’s approach to contemporary political commentary in “The Hunt.” While the opera mines ancient lore about unicorns and how to catch them — per canonic literature, virgins are the best bait — it also tweaks that received wisdom through contemporary discussions surrounding gender presentation. By consciously setting out to cast a nonbinary soprano for the role of Briar, Soper hoped to welcome transgender rights to her earlier explorations of gender.“Sirens,” Soper said, asked: “How do you go through life when you want to change who you are but can’t? How do you deal with expectations, based on how you helplessly present yourself?”By contrast, she sees “Rose” as being “a bit more open: like ‘How do you stay in love?’ And ‘Who are you in love?’ And ‘How do you try to empathetically perceive the world, in other people, without constantly getting wrapped up in your own tendencies?’”A recent rehearsal for “The Hunt,” which Soper said is about how to “survive in a culture that is specifically hostile to what you are.”Amir Hamja/The New York Times“The Hunt” is less concerned with those internal questions, and more with threats from the outside. “Certain new norms and ways of behaving — and ways of reacting to thought — seem suddenly medieval,” Soper said. “Who has power, and who has rights?”This opera, she added, is ultimately about how to “survive in a culture that is specifically hostile to what you are. And what do you do? What’s the solution?”In the interview, Soper didn’t want to give an answer that would spoil “The Hunt.” But the production’s director, Ashley Tata, who also staged Soper’s “Ipsa Dixit” at the Miller, pointed to the fact that the theater’s listing for the show credits an intimacy choreographer — so it isn’t much of a spoiler to say that the opera embraces physical pleasure.Soper said that there were “two things I felt I could offer, despite the lack of optimism I feel.”First, “When someone tells you that you’re disgusting and shameful and you don’t own your body, you can use your body to give and receive pleasure,” she said. And second, “You can say: I can do what I want with my body. You actually do have autonomy.”The intimacy among performers in “The Hunt” is remarkable, in part because of the chaste turn that much of contemporary opera has pursued in a politically fraught era. By contrast, Soper’s characters are always alive to the possibility of pleasure, even when the path forward is murky.Also enjoyable is how literate her characters are in exploring their identities. “That tends to happen in my operas, that there’s a self-conscious readership going on,” Soper said. “In ‘Here Be Sirens,’ my character was constantly reading and referring to books — as if that was going to help her.”These investigations are also laced with humor — another seemingly lost art in American opera. And Soper hopes that the pleasure she allows for characters translates to enjoyment for audiences, too.“Somehow it’s important to me,” she said. “I’m also going to write some dirty jokes in this opera. And I am a woman — whatever, deal with it.” More

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      James Jorden, Parterre Box Opera Blog Creator, Dies at 69

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      With Parterre Box, he brought together high culture, punk aesthetics and gleeful camp in an irreverent source for news, criticism and gossip.James Jorden, a feisty, influential writer and editor who brought together high culture, punk aesthetics and gleeful camp in his opera zine-turned-website Parterre Box, was found dead on Monday at his home in Sunnyside, Queens. He was 69.The police, asked by a friend in a 911 call to check on Mr. Jorden, discovered his body, but it was unclear when he died, according to the New York Police Department. The medical examiner was to determine the cause of death.In the early 1990s, Mr. Jorden was struggling to find work as a stage director in New York when he got the advice to try writing about opera rather than producing it.The East Village at the time was “a little past the peak of punk music zines, fan zines,” he recalled in a 2009 interview. “And I really liked the aesthetic, even though I had no idea what it was they were talking about.”Issues of Parterre Box in its zine form, based on the punk zines Mr. Jorden saw around the East Village.Mimicking those DIY projects, Mr. Jorden played around at home with some text, photographs cut from magazines and a glue stick. Parterre Box — which would go on to become an irreverent, essential source of news, criticism, rabid discussion and archival recordings — was born.With a four-page inaugural issue published in December 1993, it was likely the world’s first “queer opera zine,” as it described itself. Parterre Box embraced both the sublime and ridiculous aspects of the art form with a breathless, over-the-top tone familiar to the gay fans who kibitzed during intermissions at the Metropolitan Opera.Maria Callas was on the cover of that first issue (and, as Medea, graced the back of Mr. Jorden’s left shoulder in tattoo form). The contents included intense poetry; parodied the columns in more strait-laced publications like Opera News; imagined Cecilia Bartoli starring as the Long Island temptress Amy Fisher in “Cavalleria Suburbiana,” a takeoff on “Cavalleria Rusticana”; and made cutting observations about less-favored divas.“Parterre Box,” Mr. Jorden wrote on the second page, “is about remembering when opera was queer and dangerous and exciting and making it that way again.”At first, Mr. Jorden distributed copies of the zine at the Tower Records store near Lincoln Center and at the Met — tucking them into brochures in racks in the lobby and leaving them in bathroom stalls. On one occasion, caught stuffing the racks before a performance of “Salome,” he was ejected from the theater by security guards.That pugnacious, underground spirit fit the era. “It was a very activist time in the gay community, in terms of fighting back against AIDS,” Richard Lynn, a longtime contributor, told The New York Times in 2018. “And I view Parterre Box as part of that bigger cultural trend. It wasn’t afraid to be in your face or confrontational or angry. I felt it was therapeutic.”James Glen Jorden was born on Aug. 6, 1954, in Opelousas, La. His father, Billy Wayne Jorden, worked for the Louisiana State Highway Department, and his mother, Glenora (Jory) Jorden, was a high school teacher as well as a local theater director and actress. (He is survived by two brothers, John and Justin Jorden.)Mr. Jorden got his start in opera modestly, costuming a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” when he was in a gifted-and-talented program in his teens; his co-designer was a young Tony Kushner. After Mr. Jorden’s mother grew tired of his constantly playing his recording of “Pinafore,” she bought him “Carmen,” and his obsession turned to opera in general.In 1976, while attending Louisiana State University, he hitchhiked to Dallas to hear the Met on tour and saw the soprano Renata Scotto in the three leading roles of Puccini’s triptych “Il Trittico.”“That turned me around,” Mr. Jorden said in the 2009 interview. “I saw what the possibility was. And I actually choose that date as the birthday of La Cieca” — his draggy Parterre Box alter ego, named after the blind mother in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda.”After finishing college and remaining for a time in Louisiana, he moved to New York — all the while teaching, coaching, directing, acting and working day jobs, all of which continued even after Parterre Box was founded.The zine’s length, sophistication and readership gradually grew; professionals in the field began to feed Mr. Jorden valuable bits of inside information and casting news. In the voice of La Cieca — and informed by a capacious knowledge of classic theater, music and film — he skewered Met productions, aired rumors about its administration and star singers, and took other writers to task for their vocabulary quirks and for doing boosterism instead of real criticism.“I know that his blog was often very critical of the Met and me,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in an interview. “But ultimately, he was on the side of opera, and I always respected him for that.”With a deep love of the art form lying just under the barbs, the obsessively informed, fiercely opinionated, often hilarious tone of the zine translated well to the budding blogosphere when Mr. Jorden added a web version in 1996. Parterre.com’s blind items, fervent cast of regular contributors and often irascible commentariat of readers anticipated the influential internet style that would emerge in the early 2000s.Parterre Box, both as a zine and a website, became an irreverent, essential source of news, criticism, rabid discussion and archival recordings.Mr. Jorden always tried to stay ahead of the technological curve: His podcast, started on a whim in 2005, long before the medium took off, became one of the great online resources for live opera recordings. La Cieca, the host, would announce Parterre Box’s motto in an over-enunciated blue-blood accent: “Where opera is king, and you, the readers, are queens.”Parterre Box’s print version ended in 2001, but Mr. Jorden continued to run the website, in addition to writing criticism and features for other publications, including Gay City News, The New York Post, The New York Observer and The Times.As its founder and editor gained more mainstream affiliations and respectability, Parterre Box mellowed a bit. Its reviews — from a lineup of critics around the country and world — grew more measured. (The comment sections, though, could still be bracing.)At the Met, from which Mr. Jorden was once thrown out for distributing the zine, Parterre Box now has press seats. When one of its critics was granted a ticket for opening night of the company’s 2015-16 season, the moment was “a total game changer,” Mr. Jorden said. “It felt like being an adult.” More

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      The Met’s ‘Dead Man Walking’ Goes to Sing Sing

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      One by one, the inmates filed into a chapel at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y. — past a line of security officers, past a sign reading, “Open wide the door to Christ.” Under stained-glass windows, they formed a circle, introducing themselves to a crowd of visitors as composers, rappers, painters and poets. Then they began to sing.The inmates had gathered one recent afternoon for a rehearsal of “Dead Man Walking,” the death-row tale that opened the Metropolitan Opera season last week. Together, they formed a 14-member chorus that would accompany a group of Met singers for a one-night-only performance of the work before an audience of about 150 of their fellow inmates.“I feel like I’m at home,” said a chorus member, Joseph Striplin, 47, who is serving a life sentence for murder, as the men warmed up with scales and stretches. “I feel I’m alive.”Steven Osgood, the conductor, with Sister Helen Prejean. Osgood rehearsed with the inmates for more than five hours, practicing rhythm, diction and dynamics.James Estrin/The New York Times“Dead Man Walking,” based on Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 memoir about her experience trying to save the soul of a convicted murderer at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, has been staged more than 75 times around the world since its premiere in 2000.But the opera, with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Terrence McNally, had never been performed in a prison until last week at Sing Sing, which is home to more than 1,400 inmates.There were no costumes or props. Chorus members, who were dressed in prison-issued green pants, had to be counted and screened before entering the auditorium, lining up by cell block and building number. Arias were sometimes interrupted by the sound of security officers’ radios.Yet the opera, with its themes of sin and redemption — and of the pain endured by victims’ families — resonated with inmates.Michael Shane Hale, an inmate, with Jake Heggie, the composer of “Dead Man Walking” and DiDonato. Working on the opera, Hale said, “reminds you not to get lost in prison.”James Estrin/The New York TimesMichael Shane Hale, 51, a chorus member serving a sentence of 50 years to life for murder, said that he often thought of himself as a monster. In the 1990s, prosecutors sought the death penalty in his case. (New York suspended the practice in 2004.)Hale said the opera, which portrays the friendship between Sister Helen and Joseph De Rocher, a death-row prisoner, had taught him to see his own humanity.“We feel so powerless; we feel so invisible,” Hale said. “It reminds you not to get lost in prison.”Not everyone at Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison about 30 miles north of New York City, was enamored. Some prisoners declined to take part in the opera because of concerns about its dark themes, including the portrayal of a prisoner’s death by lethal injection. Carnegie Hall, which helped to bring the opera to Sing Sing through the education initiative Musical Connections, said that about half of the 30 inmates in the program did not participate. (Musical Connections, which has offered instruction in performance, music theory and composition to inmates since 2009, is among similar projects nationwide that aim to help prisoners connect with society through culture.)In the prison chapel, Wendy Bryn Harmer (at the keyboard) warms up the inmate participants, including Bartholomew Crawford, front. Crawford said the opera offered hope: “It shows you’re not alone in this world.”James Estrin/The New York TimesBartholomew Crawford, 54, who is serving a sentence of 25 years to life for burglary, said he understood the concerns of his fellow inmates, but that, for him, the opera offered hope.“It shows you’re not alone in this world,” he said. “It shows you that in the darkest hour there’s light somewhere.”The idea for bringing “Dead Man Walking” to Sing Sing emerged several years ago when an inmate promised the renowned singer Joyce DiDonato, who plays Sister Helen in the Met’s production, that the men could sing the chorus parts.“This is not just theater,” said DiDonato, who has been visiting Sing Sing since 2015. “This is a story that has real consequences.”An inmate in the choir at Sing Sing. Some prisoners in the Musical Connections program declined to take part in the opera because of concerns about its dark themes, including the portrayal of a prisoner’s death by lethal injectionJames Estrin/The New York TimesFor months, the men at Sing Sing worked on an abridged version of “Dead Man Walking.” Bryan Wagorn, a Met pianist, coached them via video chat and recorded individual chorus parts for them to study. (It took several weeks for the files to clear security.) He joined Manuel Bagorro, who manages Carnegie’s program, on visits to the prison.Paul Cortez, 43, who is serving a sentence of 25 years to life for murder, worked with Wagorn to learn the score and held Saturday night rehearsals with small groups of prisoners at Sing Sing. Some were initially hesitant, unsure if the opera advanced prisoners’ rights and fearing they “might be exploited,” he said, but eventually more people started showing up.“It was daunting at first,” said Cortez, who majored in theater in college. “I did not know how I was going to get the guys in shape. But they were so diligent. They took it seriously.”From left, Sister Helen; Wilson Chimborazo, an inmate who sings in the chorus; McKinny; Joseph Striplin, another inmate singing in the production; and DiDonato.James Estrin/The New York TimesLast month, DiDonato, joined by Sister Helen, 84, visited the prison to work through the music and to get to know the participants. They discussed life in prison, morality, shame and stigma, as well as Sister Helen’s efforts to abolish the death penalty. Some inmates, saying they were still consumed by guilt about their crimes, asked about seeking forgiveness.DiDonato and Sister Helen returned last week, two days after opening night at the Met, joined by singers and staff from the Met and Carnegie Hall, and by Heggie, who offered guidance on adapting the opera for a smaller stage and reviewed some of the inmates’ Musical Connections compositions.“We’ve got each other’s backs,” DiDonato said to everyone as rehearsal got underway. “This, now, is our circle.”DiDonato, who has been visiting Sing Sing since 2015, rehearsing in the chapel with inmates. “This is not just theater,” she said. “This is a story that has real consequences.”James Estrin/The New York TimesThe Met singers introduced themselves, taking pains to remind the inmates that they were only pretending to be prison guards and police officers. (“Clemency!” a prisoner shouted, after the bass Raymond Aceto announced he was playing the role of a warden.)Sister Helen, standing among the inmates, said that there was love and trust in the room.“This is a sacred gathering,” she added. “There is no place on earth at this time that I’d rather be. We’re going to create beauty today, and you’re going to feel it.”For more than five hours, the men worked with the Met artists, under the conductor Steven Osgood, practicing rhythm, diction and dynamics in three sections that feature the chorus.They stomped their feet and clapped their hands in “He Will Gather Us Around,” a spiritual that opens the opera, which is typically performed by women and children. And they sang with fiery intensity as De Rocher confesses his murder, shortly before his execution.The Met singers and Sister Helen after the performance. Susan Graham, third from left, told the inmates that she had not fully understood the meaning of the opera until that day.James Estrin/The New York TimesThe bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, who sings the role of De Rocher, offered encouragement, telling the inmates, “This is your moment to shine.” The soprano Latonia Moore, who performs as Sister Rose, complimented the speed with which they had learned a contemporary opera. “Bravo to you,” she said.And Susan Graham, the mezzo-soprano who plays De Rocher’s mother at the Met and originated the role of Sister Helen at the premiere of “Dead Man Walking” in 2000, told the inmates that she had not fully understood the meaning of the opera until that day.Then, around 6:30 p.m., an audience of inmates and corrections officials took their seats in the auditorium, adjacent to the chapel.“The most beautiful thing in the world is a human being that does something and is transformed,” Sister Helen said in introducing the opera. “Everybody’s worth more than the worst thing they ever did.”“How you lifted your voices tonight — that spirits stays here,” DiDonato told the inmates after the performance. “It is embedded in my heart.”James Estrin/The New York TimesThe prisoners watched intensely, tapping their toes on the concrete floor and gasping when an irate De Rocher tells Sister Helen: “You’re not a nun. You’re the angel of death.” One man stood up to applaud a scene near the end when De Rocher and Sister Helen tell each other, “I love you,” shortly before he is killed. After the final rendition of “He Will Gather Us Around,” the audience offered a standing ovation.Chorus members were moved too, including Hale, who said that De Rocher’s confession “blew me away.” He hoped that the opera would inspire inmates to take responsibility for their crimes.“We have to deal with the life we have left and move forward,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing here. You have murderers singing this piece at Sing Sing.”A guard watches over the production. “You have murderers singing this piece at Sing Sing,” said the inmate Michael Shane Hale.James Estrin/The New York TimesDiDonato told the chorus members that they had created something indelible.“How you lifted your voices tonight — that spirits stays here,” she said. “It is embedded in my heart.”In their few remaining minutes together in the chapel, the prisoners and artists embraced and signed programs. Security officers wandered the pews, reminding the inmates that it was time to go back to their cells.As a guard motioned toward an exit, Cortez thanked DiDonato and the other artists, telling them, “I will never forget this moment.”Then he headed for the door. “Now,” he said, “back to reality.” More

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      Maren Morris: The (Deluxe) Interview

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify |Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, features an interview with the country star Maren Morris, discussing:What it took to begin her career in country musicArriving in Nashville at the peak of “bro country,” with few women on the chartsReceiving backlash from her earliest singles for not being faithful to the genreChoosing to now step back from participating in country music institutions such as award shows and radio promotionSpeaking out against Nashville’s poor track record of providing opportunities for female and non-white performers, and also against peers like Morgan Wallen and Jason AldeanHow the rightward politicization of country music has changed the tenor of working in Nashville, and the breakthrough of Oliver AnthonyHer recent EP, “The Bridge,” and working on new music with Jack AntonoffA Texas-themed snack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sarah Vaughan

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      All it might take is a second and a half of hearing her sing to make your spine tingle or your heart drop. Opera singers, jazz vocalists, writers and Vaughan’s biographer share their favorites.For over a year, we’ve been rooting through jazz history five minutes at a time. We’ve covered favorites by Ornette Coleman, Mary Lou Williams, New Orleans’s jazz greats and many others. Now let’s turn our attention to a vocalist who epitomized — but couldn’t be contained by — jazz: Sarah Vaughan, “The Divine One,” owner of perhaps the most impressive vocal instrument in recorded history.Forget five minutes, all it might take is a second and a half of hearing her sing to make your spine tingle or your heart drop. Across her wide contralto range she could easily alternate between thick vibrato and crystal-clear precision. Vaughan began her career as a teenager singing bebop — a then-new style that was almost exclusively the domain of hotshot instrumentalists. But she could improvise an exacting scat solo, right alongside the horn players.Raised in a musical family in Newark, Vaughan first hit the road with Earl Hines’s big band in the mid-1940s, after its other singer, Billy Eckstine, saw her win a talent show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She became an integral part of the band, and then a star. Though naturally shy, she made it clear early on that she was to be treated as any other musician, and her bandmates soon started calling her “Sailor,” because of her fluency with four-letter words.Heading off on a tour with Hines in 1944, she and the pianist John Malachi were lugging their suitcases into Union Station in Washington when he made the mistake of chivalry, holding the door open for her. “What are you standing up there looking at me for, fool?” she demanded. “Go on through the door! You damn fool.” Maybe that’s the moment when he gave her another of her many nicknames: “Sassy.” In any case, it stuck, and it’s the one she is still known by today.As her career progressed, Vaughan — who died in 1990, at 66 — ventured into rock and Brazilian music. Read on for a sampling of standout Vaughan performances selected by opera singers, jazz vocalists, critics, fiction writers and Vaughan’s biographer. Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlist at the bottom of the article and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Lizz Wright, vocalist“Tenderly”Sarah Vaughan’s voice is a whole atmosphere. In a few exquisite phrases, the current of her vibrato and the richness of her tone usher the listener into a place in time, into the poetry of song, and hint at the wealth of a great mind. As a Black woman in America, Sarah found a way to stand before masses of people around the world commanding their patient attention, respect and admiration through her powerful vocals and masterfully whimsical phrasing. Her enchanted voice gently opened doors that were often closed to women, people of color and vocalists. Everything under Sarah’s voice is draped in a playful and sacred charm that makes the moment richer than it was. She was aptly called “The Divine One.”Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Wesley Brown, novelist“Send in the Clowns”Sarah. Words fail to measure up. Like Beckett, I try to fail better. A hush steadies all in the club. The mic rests ready against her chest where voice and heartbeat greet. Me on the ground, she in midair with her usual flair. Every breath a parachute, full of rumbles and quivers and flavors of sass. Such a flirt she is, the shimmy in the shoulders, much girlish mischief in the mouth. Isn’t it bliss? Me still on the ground, she in midair. Words not up to snuff. Quick. Don’t bother. She’s here!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Cécile McLorin Salvant, vocalist“Maria”The most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard is Sarah Vaughan singing this. I believe this is one of the most luxurious vocal recordings of all time. I go back to this video very often when I want to treat myself. I’m so fascinated by her vibrato and by the moments when she gives us those sweeps in range. This version of “Maria,” a song from “West Side Story,” has an intimate, secret quality at crucial moments, and yet it is overwhelmingly grandiose, regal. I have always loved this about Sarah Vaughan. She can take you to these incredible heights with her voice, but with a word, a note, is able to infuse her interpretations with a quotidian, offhand quality. She does not keep her voice in the same place — it is heterogenous, which is what makes it so fun, so rich, so moving. She is divine and human.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Emily Lordi, writer“I’ll Be Seeing You”Many artists have performed “I’ll Be Seeing You,” Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal’s ballad of lost love and longing. But no one has lingered in it as languorously as Sarah Vaughan. Her version of the song, recorded live with her veteran trio at Tivoli Gardens in 1963, expresses no interest in moving on or “healing.” Instead, Vaughan initiates a long, slow waltz with heartache. By casting herself into every phrase, she implies that the pain of imagining her lover in their old haunts (carousels, cafes) not only revives him; it enlivens her (hence the protracted “I” with which she begins). In a feat of breath control, she bridges the song’s two opening statements — inviting, even willing, a world made more vibrant by the afterlife of love, as it smudges the edges of everything.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Samara Joy, vocalist“Time After Time”I admire how much care she puts into every word, making sure that the story of the song is heard and felt. Any improvisatory changes made to the melody are done with taste and feeling. I also love how she uses the full range of her voice to deliver the song. I almost thought the song ended once she hit that final high A-flat, but after descending two octaves lower, oscillating between G and A-flat, this Sarah performance became an instant favorite.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Ben Ratliff, former Times jazz and pop critic“The Thrill Is Gone”I like hearing Sarah Vaughan tear it up on an extra-slow-tempo ballad, 50 beats per minute or lower. With small groups, her unremitting virtuosity made a certain kind of design sense: She filled in the canyon-like spaces between beats. But I also like hearing her singing at slug tempos with thick, commercial, easy-listening studio arrangements: In an atmosphere of languid appeasement, she bounces off the walls. For the front half of “The Thrill Is Gone,” on “Vaughan and Violins” (1958), the arrangement by Quincy Jones clears open space for her to go full Sarah, strange Sarah, with her feats of breath control, mic technique, timbral shifts, trilling and sliding notes, hard emphatic gestures. But she keeps doing it after the tide of violins enters. I mean, the first “gone” is more than three seconds long, most of it the letter “n”; at 0:34, she delivers a pinched, acid “… si-ii-ighs”; at 0:38, “a-hand re-ee-huh-a-lize”; at 0:51, “the nights: the nights are so cold.” At a certain point you’re noticing every detail. Most affective ballads work their affect intermittently — there are a few select peaks, which makes them easier to remember. Vaughan’s were nearly all peak, and in that she took a risk.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Charenee Wade, vocalist“Once in a While”Sarah Vaughan, my first musical love, always brought newness to everything she sang each time she stepped onto the stage. There is a great early recording on MGM in 1949 of this song where, if one listens closely, her undeniably infectious tone and masterful phrasing speak through. This particular clip of her live performance of “Once in a While” is filmed almost 30 years later, and that essence is still there, but even more enriched. Her vocal range was unparalleled and became even deeper as she “seasoned.” She is a soulfully spontaneous and playful improviser. Her stage presence is transfixing, and her comedic timing is delightfully charming. She holds the entire room in the palm of her hand with each story she tells and intimate moment she shares. Her vocal technique is flawless, no matter which decade of her career, and one would be blessed to be able to witness her sitting down at the piano and accompanying herself just as well as any pianist had for her in the past. She is iconic, and quintessentially the definition of a True Jazz Vocalist. My first love, and I know you will love her too!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Elaine M. Hayes, biographer“Whatever Lola Wants”Sarah Vaughan’s “Whatever Lola Wants,” released in 1955, is a pop masterpiece. In less than three minutes, she perfectly embodies her role as a provocative temptress while demonstrating her vocal prowess, technical mastery, and savvy as a storyteller. On the surface, she sings straight. But she in fact infuses the Broadway tune with her trademark vocal inflections and nuances. A delicious slide here, a microtonal bend there. With each verse she adds layers of complexity that build momentum, pulling the listener through her performance. And while Vaughan keeps a strict beat, she deftly conveys uncertainty and spontaneity, constantly pushing the boundaries between control and the loss of control to produce a delightful tension between the two. Musically, she has re-created the dynamics of a successful seduction. By the time she sings the final “I’m irresistible, you fool/Give in, give in, give in,” her success — and the success of her single, which peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard and Variety charts — seems a foregone conclusion.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Fredara Hadley, scholar“The Shadow of Your Smile”The older I get, the more I revel in listening to grown women’s voices. We often think of what age subtracts, but I’m attracted by what it adds. Growing up in church, people would say, “You have to be a certain age to sing that song.” Sometimes, life experience has to catch up with lyrics. One recording that always makes me feel this way is Sarah Vaughan’s 1966 interpretation of Johnny Mandel and Paul Francis Webster’s “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Sarah Vaughan is a master interpreter of song, both melodically and narratively. I know there are countless recordings of this song, but whenever someone mentions it, I only ever think of hers.This is Vaughan in her 40s singing with an alluring alchemy of tender reflection with the gravitas of life experience. All of her soulful vocal virtuosity paired with an orchestral arrangement infused with a bossa nova groove lulls the listener into a dreamscape. It is nearly four minutes of her starting deep in her rich contralto voice and carrying us higher into her lilting soprano. Her vocal ascent reflects the lyrical joy of remembrance, and then toward the end, she gently descends and places us back into reality. It’s an expertly crafted blend of shadow and sun, light and dark, in the colors of her voice and the story she tells. This is Sarah Vaughan in full bloom as a singer and as a woman.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Will Friedwald, author“Misty”Back in the ’80s, my favorite selection on the jukebox at the Angry Squire was the 1959 single of Sarah Vaughan singing “Misty,” with Quincy Jones’s orchestra and Zoot Sims on tenor. Even at that noisy bar in Chelsea, the first notes of that 45 would cause the whole room to instantly freeze — as if the voice of a goddess were beaming in from another world. Some critics accused Vaughan of not paying enough attention to lyrics in general, but here was a song where she didn’t just sing the words, she actually became them. She didn’t just get “Misty” in the sense of teary-eyed, but she seemed to dissolve bodily into the atmosphere and cling “to a cloud.” Even 30 years after her passing from this world to the next, that record still has that effect on me.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Angel Blue, vocalist“They Can’t Take That Away From Me”The brilliance of Sarah Vaughan reaches far beyond her exquisite sound. Perhaps her most intriguing quality is her vocal ability. Going from a high soprano range to a low contralto range effortlessly seems to be something that she was able to do within any song. One of the songs that I find particularly fascinating is “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”: She demonstrates her ability to catch the listener’s ear with a simple melody by her strong use of diction, straight tone singing, and embellished vibrato to highlight a specific word or end of the phrase.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz critic“Like a Lover (O Cantador)”In the last chapter of her career, Vaughan built herself a new home in the music of Brazil, recording three albums of bossa, jazz and contemporary Brazilian pop. At the end of the first LP, “I Love Brazil,” she’s joined by the Rio de Janeiro-born balladeer Dori Caymmi on his song “Like a Lover (O Cantador).” Caymmi adds the occasional cascade of wordless vocals, as if to provide Vaughan with her string section, but mostly it’s just his acoustic guitar and her voice, singing lyrics in English about an unrequited love. In her mid-50s, Vaughan sounds like someone who knows the feeling of desire inside and out: its urgency, its unreason, the sting that can sometimes be its only reward. But enough with all that. You don’t get very far weighing Sarah Vaughan down with conversations about “authenticity” or “message.” She is concerned almost completely with the joy of singing: the variety of shapes that her notes can take, how they feel, how they taste, whether they’ll sit still or wriggle in her grasp. And that’s where the optimism that you can hear in this track comes from: She knows a song is a lover that will always requite. Sure enough, if you go back to the original Portuguese lyrics, they aren’t actually about a lover at all, they’re about a singer’s devotion to song. One of them translates to: “If only I knew how to cry/Alas, I’m a singer, I can only sing.”Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Alicia Keys Steps Into a New Spotlight

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      “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical inspired by the singer-songwriter’s teenage years in New York, is set to open Off Broadway.One night this summer, Alicia Keys fell asleep listening to show tunes.She was on vacation following a five-week concert tour, but her mind was still at work: For 12 years, she has been developing “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical based on her adolescence in a then-gritty New York neighborhood, and at the top of her to-do list was writing a new song for the actress playing the main character’s mother.So she took a nap with her headphones on, listening to a playlist of theatrical mom songs (think “Rose’s Turn” from “Gypsy” and “Little Girls” from “Annie”). When she woke up, she could feel the rhythm. She could hear the chords. She could see the title.She ducked into a closet and began to sing into her phone. She hopped online, doing a little research to strengthen her lyrics. And then, when she returned to New York, she began to write, in the wee hours after the meetings and the calls and the rehearsals, noodling at an upright piano in her Chelsea recording studio.“This is occupying a lot of space in my mind,” Keys said about the musical, considered but candid as she was driven to a downtown rehearsal hall, tuning out the traffic and focusing on getting where she wants to go.Maleah Joi Moon is making her professional stage debut as the show’s protagonist, the 17-year-old Ali.Elias Williams for The New York TimesThat day, where she wanted to go was the Public Theater, the celebrated but pandemic-weakened nonprofit where “Hell’s Kitchen” is to begin an Off Broadway run on Oct. 24. Even though Keys is not in it, demand is high: Each time more tickets go on sale, they are snatched up.“I am thinking a lot about ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ and obviously the goal for it to be tremendously beloved and really something that comes into the world in a way that is just like a storm, an incredible storm,” Keys said. “And the goal, obviously, is to transfer to Broadway. So that’s heavy on my mind.”With 15 Grammys, five No. 1 albums and about 5 billion song streams, Keys is an unusual figure in the music world — a classically trained pianist turned R&B singer-songwriter who signed a recording contract as a teenager and remains, at 42, determined, driven and resolutely in control of her creative and commercial life.Her musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is unusual too, in ways that seem promising. Unlike many biographical jukebox shows chronicling childhood to celebrity, this one is both focused and fictionalized, depicting a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali.“This is not Tina Turner, this is not the Temptations, this is not MJ, this is not Carole King — although all of those are phenomenal,” Keys said, referring to shows about pop stars. “It’s really so much more about relationships and identity and trying to find who you are, which I think is a continuous theme in all of our lives: Who are we? Who do we want to be? Who are we becoming?”In “Hell’s Kitchen,” Ali, like Keys, is the daughter of a white mother and a Black father and is growing up in Manhattan Plaza, a subsidized housing development just outside Times Square where 70 percent of the units are for performing artists. The supporting characters — a hyper-protective single mother, a life-changing piano teacher, an older boyfriend and an unreliable father — are based on figures in Keys’s own upbringing.At its heart, “Hell’s Kitchen” is a mother-daughter love story, featuring the stage veteran Shoshana Bean, left, during a rehearsal with Moon.Elias Williams for The New York Times“We’ve highly fictionalized the specifics,” said Kristoffer Diaz, a playwright and librettist who has been working with Keys on the show for more than a decade. Along the way, Keys and Diaz have been joined by the Broadway veteran Michael Greif, who directed “Dear Evan Hansen,” and by the choreographer Camille A. Brown, an in-demand dance-maker.In some ways, the show’s narrative structure resembles that of Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film, “The Fabelmans”: It is a coming-of-age story about a gifted teenager with a fractured family; it ends with the protagonist’s trajectory unclear, but audiences can fill in the blanks based on what they already know about the author’s accomplishments.Keys resisted suggestions that the musical give audiences a road map to Ali’s future — a future in which she might, like Keys, become a big star. “Sometimes they would push: ‘And how about we…?’ And I was like, ‘No.’ ‘No,’” she said. “You just need to know that she is going to find something. Everything else is irrelevant.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is, in the eyes of its creative team, a mother-daughter love story. And, in an era when many musicals market themselves as love letters either to Broadway or to New York, this one falls squarely into the latter camp: Keys’s identity, as a person and as a songwriter, was shaped by the city in the 1990s, and that informs the show’s sounds (like bucket drumming) and movement (with echoes of social dances like the Running Man).The score, played by a band that will include a pianist visible to the audience even when actors pretend to be tickling the ivories, features Keys’s best-known hits: “Fallin’,” “No One,” “Girl on Fire,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” and, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z that has become an inescapable New York City anthem. Keys said she has written four new songs for the show, but that even existing songs have a new sound because they have been rearranged.“I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love,” Keys said, reflecting on her initial aspirations for “Hell’s Kitchen.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“The songs that you think you know,” she said, “you never heard like this.”Making a musical might seem like a swerve for Keys, but the truth is the overlap between the recording industry and musical theater is substantial. There is an ever-growing inventory of jukebox musicals biographical (“MJ,” about Michael Jackson) and fictional (“& Juliet”), as well as shows with original scores written by pop stars (“Here Lies Love”).Keys is a lifelong theatergoer who has dabbled in acting — she played Dorothy in a preschool production of “The Wizard of Oz” and had a cameo on “The Cosby Show” at 4 — but her passion was always music. She studied piano from age 7, was performing in a girl group and wrote her first song at around 11, and signed that recording contract at 15. Childhood moved fast — she skipped two grades and moved out at 16.“She knew a lot before she should have,” said her mother, Terria Joseph. (Mother and daughter both use stage names.)When Keys was a child, Joseph was a struggling actor — that’s how she qualified to live at Manhattan Plaza — who took survival jobs, particularly as a paralegal, while trying to find work as a performer. (Keys’s father, a flight attendant, did not live with them and was mostly not around; though Keys was close to her paternal grandparents, she was often estranged from her father. Now, she says, they are good.)Keys would tag along to auditions and rehearsals when her mother couldn’t afford a babysitter; when there was enough money, they would stand in line at the TKTS booth and buy discount theater tickets. Her mother recalls an early trip to “Cats,” and Keys remembers “Miss Saigon,” but the show that stands out most is “Rent,” in part because it’s about AIDS, which hit Manhattan Plaza, with its high population of gay artists, quite hard. “Rent,” like “Hell’s Kitchen,” was directed by Greif.She was valedictorian of her graduating class at the city’s Professional Performing Arts School, and attended Columbia University for a month before dropping out to pursue music. In 2001, with the release of “Fallin’,” and boosted by an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” her career took off.Keys has continued to see theater when she can, and in 2011 she co-produced a Broadway play, “Stick Fly,” about an affluent Black family wrestling with race and class. According to her mother, who is always trying to take her to more theater, Keys has long been thinking about developing her own show. “It was on her bucket list for some time,” Joseph said.“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” the Public Theater’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said of Keys (above, at a rehearsal). “There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“Stick Fly,” Keys said, “ignited this desire in me, across all mediums in regards to storytelling, to be able to start to hear, feel and see stories that I know exist, but in so many ways the world doesn’t see.” And when she started cooking up “Hell’s Kitchen,” she had audacious goals.“Because I have all the experience with seeing theater since a kid, I just was really ready to reinvent theater, too,” she said. “I just felt like there was so much to bring, so many worlds to collide and cross. I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love.”Hang on! There are people who can’t stand musical theater? Apparently, yes, and one of them is Keys’s husband, Swizz Beatz, a renowned hip-hop producer.“He’s not a fan,” Keys said, laughing. “Do not bring him to the show where in the middle of the sentence they break out into the song. He falls asleep. He cringes. He can’t take it.”So one goal, Keys said, is simply to create a show her husband will like. (The two make up a power couple, with multiple homes and a significant contemporary art collection; they have two children together, and are also helping to raise his three children from previous relationships.)And what about reinventing theater? When I ask her about that word, she qualifies it — mindful of how it might sound and wary after two decades talking to journalists. Keys said she thinks about her project differently now, because she believes that over the last decade, Broadway has made strides.“I don’t want you to now quote me and say I’m reinventing Broadway,” she said. “I want to be clear that there’s so many pieces that exist now that really do challenge, I think, what we were seeing. There of course needs to be more diversity on Broadway. Is there more already? Hell yeah. And we still need more.”I write about the business of Broadway, so one thing that has struck me, as I’ve been working on this profile, is Keys’s ownership — economic as well as artistic — of “Hell’s Kitchen.” Rather than finding Broadway producers to finance and shepherd the show, thus far she is doing so herself, retaining the rights to its commercial future.“I want to own my story,” she told me. “And I deserve to.”She consults, and is heard, on every strategic and creative choice: writing, casting, staging, marketing.Keys has been shuttling between her recording studio in Chelsea and the rehearsal space, while fine-tuning the show’s sound.Elias Williams for The New York Times“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public. “She’s been as involved as any artist I’ve ever worked with — she gets involved on a level of granularity that’s just astonishing. It’s not just music, but every sentence, every relationship, every actor. There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Maleah Joi Moon, who at 21 is making a professional stage debut playing Ali, was taken aback to realize that Keys, whose music was a staple in Moon’s childhood home, would actually be involved on a day-to-day basis.“When I saw the project, I was like, no way was she really attached to this,” Moon said. “And to find out, once I got into the rehearsal room, that she was going to be so heavily involved — it was insane.”Keys radiated warmth as well as intensity during a rehearsal, a novel (“The Vanishing Half”) at her elbow while she bounced in her chair to the beat and tapped out ideas on her phone. “She’s very specific with her notes,” said Shoshana Bean, the actress playing Ali’s mother.She teaches songs to the ensemble. (“You’ve never been to a more charged, lively and thrilling music rehearsal than when she’s running them,” Greif said.) She instructs the stars on vocal technique. (“She has expressed herself about what parts of my voice she wants me to use,” said Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Ali’s father.)She even attended auditions for understudies, and she told me she was relocating a piano in her studio to try to replicate the sonic environment of the theater, thinking she would record the songs in the show and give demos to the band “so they get the feel, they get the swing, they get the idea, they get the energy.”“I’m very, very anal,” she said, “and I know how I want everything to sound.”Control has been a central theme of Keys’s career. While still a teenager, she successfully extricated herself from the contract she had signed with Columbia Records, chafing at efforts to mold her image and sound.“It’s important for me to properly express how I feel at the moment and not have it filtered through other people,” she told Oprah at age 20. Now she preaches self-determination. “If you don’t know what you want for yourself, then you’ll never, never get there,” she told me. “You’ll always be deterred.”Several times, as we talked, she circled back to her concerns about the way the music industry treats artists, and she said one of her long-term goals is “redesigning the industry.”“I feel like as a young artist, we get very taken advantage of, and it’s unfortunate we find ourselves in these circumstances that do not benefit us to the level that it should,” she said. “And I’m lucky. I am in control of all of my music and all of the things that I’ve created. But let me tell you, that’s not the normal story. And I had to fight for it.”Maintaining creative and financial control has become “a mission,” she said, and with “Hell’s Kitchen,” she believes the lessons she has learned are paying off.“For the first time in my life,” she said. “I’m doing something exactly right.”That startled me, given her success. “Really?” I asked.The score is a mix of new songs and Keys’s best-known hits, including, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z.Elias Williams for The New York Times“I really do,” she said. She explained that with previous projects, “I didn’t start out right, but kind of ended up right.” But this time, she said, “I didn’t want to go out and get too diluted and get too many partners. We have all the right partners, all the right minds. It’s the right mixture of experience and also newness that I think is important to continue to create a new world.”One night in mid-July, I took the subway to Barclays Center to watch Keys do what she is best known for: perform. For 90 minutes she entertained a rapturous crowd of 11,894 — strikingly more diverse, and younger, than most theater audiences. Her sparkling Yamaha piano was in the center of the arena, on a rotating stage, with runways extending out so she could work the crowd.Just before the concert, as she often does, she presided over what she calls a Soulcare Session, promoting her skin care line (“I call them offerings, not products — products is too transactional”), talking up empowerment (“The theme today is reminding ourselves to own our own power”), and posing for pictures with superfans who had paid a steep premium for up-close access (“You can talk to me about anything you want,” she said). Her staff sprayed the patrons with a “reviving aura mist” and invited them to select keys (get it?) with words of affirmation; attendees sat on embroidered pillows, black beanbags and purple cushions and asked Keys about her wardrobe, her writing process, her childhood. Some spoke about how her songs had helped them endure disease or emotional hardship.Keys has long had an entrepreneurial streak — she started a babysitters club when she was 11 — and it is ever-expanding. “I’m really interested in business at this point,” she told me when I asked about what’s next.She’s all-in on “Hell’s Kitchen,” of course. She intends to further build up Key SoulCare. And she’ll make more music.“I feel like I’m in a place where I can express myself clearly,” she said. “I am clear about what I want, what I don’t want. Who I want to do it with, who I don’t want to. I’m unafraid to be very vocal and verbal about that, and I feel like I’m in a place where I can do anything, anything. And I haven’t even begun yet.” More

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      Krayzie Bone of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony Posts From Hospital Bed

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      “Never take life for granted enjoy it while you have it!” the rapper wrote on social media. He posted a picture from a hospital, saying he had been in a nine-day fight for his life.Krayzie Bone, a member of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, one of the most influential rap groups in history, has been fighting for his life for several days, he said in a post on social media on Monday that included a photo of him in a hospital.The cause of the hospitalization is unknown. The 50-year-old rapper, whose real name is Anthony Henderson, has for several years battled sarcoidosis, a rare autoimmune disease that can cause respiratory problems if it reaches the lungs. He was forced to postpone part of a 2016 tour as a result. The hip-hop news site All Hiphop reported that he had checked himself into a Los Angeles area hospital on Sept. 22 after coughing up blood.Krayzie Bone said on Instagram on Monday that he had just fought to stay alive for “9 days straight.” “Never take life for granted enjoy it while you have it!” he wrote.Known for its harmonies and buzzy hooks, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony is one of the pioneering groups of the melodic rap that dominates the genre today. Mr. Henderson is one of five members of the group, which was formed in Cleveland in the early 1990s. They received a lift from Eazy-E, a founding member of the rap group N.W.A., who signed the group to his label, Ruthless Records, in 1993. “Creepin on ah Come Up,” their debut album on the label, sold millions and made them the first hip-hop group from Cleveland to break into the mainstream.Bone Thugs-N-Harmony were nominated for three Grammys, and won one in 1997 for best rap performance by a duo or group. (Their Grammy-winning hit, “Tha Crossroads,” was in part a tribute to Eazy-E, who died from AIDS in 1995.) Members of the group have collaborated with some of the biggest names in pop music history, including Tupac Shakur and Mariah Carey.“When our management got a call about Mariah Carey wanting to do a record with us, at the time, we didn’t even really understand how big Mariah Carey was,” Mr. Henderson told The New York Times in an interview published in August as part of a project celebrating five decades of hip hop. Krayzie Bone appeared on Carey’s track “Breakdown” off her 1997 album.“We knew of her, but we were so wrapped up in our newfound fame, we were just in our own little world. So, like, we almost didn’t even go.”In 2011, Mr. Henderson left the group but eventually reunited with his former bandmates. The city of Cleveland renamed a street after the group this summer.“The Bone Thugs style developed by just basically being in cyphers together,” Mr. Henderson told The Times. “We would smoke weed either in my mother’s basement or at whoever’s house we was at, and we’d just start rhyming, working on our harmonies and everything. We knew each other and we knew we could rhyme but when the other four would say the ad-libs, it would sound like we was harmonizing. It’s nothing we did on purpose — we just started doing it and that was our style one day.”Mr. Henderson was born on June 17, 1973. Along with his work with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Mr. Henderson has released solo albums since 1999, including “QuickFix: Level 3: Level Up,” which came out earlier this year. He also founded the nonprofit Spread the Love Foundation, a Cleveland-based initiative aimed at music education.Bone Thugs-N-Harmony are in the midst of a national tour and had returned to Cleveland with Krayzie Bone in August. More

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      Stevie Nicks Unveils a Her Own Barbie at MSG

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      The performer worked with Mattel to create a doll in her likeness, wearing an outfit inspired by the one she wore on the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours.” She showed it off onstage at Madison Square Garden.Midway through Stevie Nicks’s concert at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, the musician told the audience that she had a “surprise,” prompting speculation among audience members about a potential unexpected guest: Could it be Lindsey Buckingham?It turned out that the special guest was a Barbie made to look like Nicks, and its musical abilities were limited to a tiny ribboned tambourine.Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie, officially unveiled the Stevie Nicks doll at midnight on Sunday, the latest addition to the world of Barbie tributes to musicians, including Tina Turner, David Bowie and Celia Cruz.(You may be thinking, that’s a lot of Barbie this year, and you are right. The audience at Madison Square Garden didn’t seem to mind.)Bradley Justice, a doll historian and proprietor of the Swell Doll Shop, which specializes in antique and vintage dolls, said that Mattel has been making celebrity dolls since the 1960s.“I see it as sort of a crossover branding, where you attract someone who previously may have not had an interest at all in the doll or the brand,” he said, “but suddenly is very excited to see their favorite singer or movie star or whatever immortalized in 11 and a half inches.”The Nicks doll’s outfit, as well as a pair of Pasquale Di Fabrizio black platform boots, was inspired by her look on the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album “Rumours.”At the concert, Nicks explained that she sent the album cover outfit, which she still had decades later, to Mattel to capture that time in her life. To roaring cheers, Nicks began to speak in a high-pitched Barbie voice, explaining how much the doll meant to her.Nicks wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that when she looked at the doll, she saw herself at 27.“All the memories of walking out on a big stage in that black outfit and those gorgeous boots come rushing back,” Nicks said, “and then I see myself now in her face.”At the concert, Nicks also chose a fan in the front rows to take one doll home and promptly began to serenade the woman, named Sara, with the track bearing her name from the album “Tusk.”The doll went on sale hours later for $55, and preorders sold out almost immediately.Mr. Justice said that it was normal for the celebrity Barbie dolls to sell out quickly. “When you hear it’s coming, you need to just go ahead and start limbering up your fingers for your keyboard to type in your credit card number,” he said.The design team behind the Tina Turner doll studied Turner’s hair “at all angles.”The rush on the Nicks doll comes after decades of Mattel’s creation of Barbie dolls that honor influential musicians, athletes and pioneers.Mr. Justice said that one of the first celebrity Barbie dolls, released in 1969, depicted Diahann Carroll as the star of “Julia,” the first American television series to chronicle the life of a Black professional woman.More recently, Mattel released a doll of Celia Cruz, the Cuban American singer who was known as the Queen of Salsa. The Cruz doll, dressed in a red lace mermaid dress, was unveiled in 2021 but only went on sale this year.Carlyle Nuera, who designed that doll, said on Instagram that the design team had gone back and forth “with the fabric vendor to get the right scale of the lace design and to maximize the gold metallic threads woven throughout.”A Tina Turner doll that was released in October 2022 has sold out in stores, but it is available on eBay for hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars.That doll depicts Turner in the outfit she wore in the music video for “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”Turner, who died in May, was very involved with her doll’s design process, Bill Greening, a Mattel designer, said in a news release. Mr. Greening explained that the design team studied Turner’s hair “at all angles” to capture her look. “Lots of teasing and hair spray was involved!” he said.David Bowie has been honored with two Barbie dolls dressed in two of his classic outfits.Left, Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; Chris Pizzello/Associated PressDavid Bowie has been commemorated with two Barbie dolls dressed in tribute to two of his famous looks.Linda Kyaw-Merschon, who led the design of the second doll, which was released last year, said that it was meant to be a Barbie as Bowie, “not Bowie exactly as himself.”The doll was dressed in a replica of the powder blue suit Bowie wore in the “Life on Mars?” music video.The earlier Bowie doll, released in 2019, dressed as Bowie’s alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, wore a metallic red and blue striped get-up with siren-red platform boots and a gold circle on her forehead.The Stevie Nicks doll was released after a big year for Barbie. The Barbie movie released in July made more than $1 billion in ticket sales at the global box office in a few weeks, according to Warner Bros., and has created a windfall for Mattel.Nicks told USA Today that she loved the movie and said “I had to come home and tell my Stevie doll all about it.”Melina Delkic More